Childhood

Let's start from the beginning. I was a young girl.

I was eleven years old, and my parents had just divorced, and my dad was now living with his girlfriend in Portland, Orgon. And this was my first summer vacation where I stayed at a different home than my childhood home. And the moment I walked in that house, I felt like I wasn't alone, that there was energy there, that there were spirits there, that I was being watched in every room.

And it was my first night in this new house.

I fall asleep a little bit, but then I'm awakened by being touched.

And then my hair is touched. It's not a heavy touch, it's a light touch.

So I leap and go down the little stairs of the bunk bed and I rush over and I'm going to go run into my dad's room, but I froze.

I felt that.

Whatever was touching me was over there too. I wasn't going to be safe in my dad's room, and I didn't feel safe with my dad, and so I laid in the hallway floor with a light on, curled up in a ball, hoping that the night would just go away fast. And in the morning my dad stepped over me and he said, why did you fall asleep in the hallway? And I said I was being touched, Dad, something was touching me. And he said, Oh, don't pay any attention to them. They bothered me all the time

Melissa, who is your dad and what is he known as?

My father is Keith Hunter Jesperson. He's known as the happy Face serial killer.

My girl, my girl, don't lie.

To me.

Tell me where did you sleep last night? In the pies? In the pies where the sun don't have a shine? I will shiver.

Oh nice.

My name is Lauren bry Pacheco. I'm a television producer and I've worked with Melissa Jessperson Moore for about four years. We work on crime stories together and we travel a lot, and during our downtime we've had the chance to really get to know one another. And she shared a lot with me about her past, especially her childhood.

My childhood home was amazing. My parents had three children together.

I'm the oldest a year later, my brother was born, and then two years after my brother, my sister, Carrie was born, and my mom was a stay at home mom and my father was a long haul truck driver. I felt loved, I felt provided for, I felt adored. I actually felt like I was a super are.

Menissa, how big are you?

This big yees real big.

Dance Manista, you dance, You're a good dancwer.

We lived in the country, and when I would hear the semi truck pull up, and you could hear the wheels on the gravel, and you just knew, you knew, you could easily recognize that sound. The window panes would actually shake because of the size and the rumble of

Could get Dad's change. And that was our first encounter with him.

And you pick us up and he would throw us in the air and play with us and be excited to see us. He would be just as excited to see us as we were excited to see him.

Everybody thinks they're you know, their dad is the center of the universe, But your dad, How did you feel being placed up on his shoulders.

I love the view that I could see so much more, and I felt that I was absolutely safe and that anything was possible, and that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and that was safe in the arms with my dad. He was six foot six and close to three hundred pounds. His size was something. The first thing you notice, how you feel so small in comparison.

Keith was this huge giant man even to adults, so for a child, he must have seemed even that much more enormous. And when Melissa talks about him, she has this reverence, this almost mythological lens that she views him through.

I felt like my dad was a superhero because he was so large, and he could actually eclipse the sun with his with his head, like he just his body, like the sun would just like beam behind him, and he could just eclipse the sun.

Phil Stanford, The Oregonian, Maywecond, nineteen ninety four. The letter, unsigned and written on pale blue paper, has a happy face at the top of the first page, two tiny circles for eyes, an upturned sliver of a moon for mouth. Have a nice day, all five of it, says next to the cartoon face. However, the letter is six pages long, So what does that mean? Five? What? Five murders? That's what.

Melissa agreed to go on the road with me and our producer Noel and revisit the places from her past that have incredible significance, both good and bad, to her today, and one of those places was Spokane, Washington, where she moved with her mother and siblings after her parents' divorce.

I haven't been Spokane for a long time, but whenever I come back here, I think about the first time I came here back in nineteen ninety. My dad was home for the weekend and we had a great weekend. We're really close and it was like a normal weekend, and then it was time for my mom to drop off my dad at the truck station. And on the way to the truck station to his offices, there was just this tension in the air and there was something obviously going on between my parents, my mom and my dad.

We drove there because we were going to meet her mom, Rose, who we met at work.

I'm excited to see her. Yeah, I'm glad that you're going to meet her. She's a caseworker for a Salvation Army where she helps families who are on the streets transition to having a life off the streets. And so these are children that have lived in cars. These are children that have nothing very similar to what I had and what she had. I wonder if she has a picture of me in her office.

I think she might be coming out.

Well.

They hadn't seen each other in a few years, but you could definitely hear the warmth and the pride and the love in Melissa's voice when she described her to us.

You know what you'll find that about my mom is she's a very nurturing, soft person that you could tell anything too. So not dregonical home. Oh my skinny, Oh my gosh, you're getting small, my office.

Is over here.

Meeting Melissa's mom in person, I was really taken aback by the fact that they don't look alike. Melissa's always told me that she looks just like her father, and I never saw it until I met her mom. She absolutely looks like her father.

When I was flying down here, I was thinking about what your experience must have been like, because when we came here.

Is after you dud separated.

I remember just, you know, leaving and coming here m without planning, right, That's what it felt like.

It wasn't planned.

You're correct, it wasn't what happened. Well, it was our thirteenth wedding anniversary and I was expecting a bouquet of flowers and he said, you know, I think we should just get a divorce.

He said, would you mind just leaving?

And were you happy at any point with him? I think at the very beginning we had a lot of fun and we would we'd take a month off and we'd traveled down I five, all the way down California along the beaches, or you know, I didn't know that. Oh, yeah, we did, we did. We'd take a month off, go to Lake Powell. We'd go to Canada. Oh. He had a golden wing motorcycle and we went all through Canada, traveling through uh Lethbridge and Alberta.

And it was a good provider, he really was.

And you probably felt really financially.

Still, I felt safe. And then I had you, and then things changed.

I would like to tell my story. The writer of the letter begins. The exclamation point is all his, so as the labored printing and the odd mixture of capital and lowercase letters. Onor about January twentieth, nineteen ninety, I picked up Sonya Bennett, and I took her home. I raped her and beat her real bad. Then I ended her life by pushing my fist into her throat.

When my dad was so up into town, he didn't get a hotel. He would stay at our home, my mom's home, and even when she was with her new boyfriend who became her husband, my dad would stay in the house with him in the house as well. The reward of him coming was he's filling the pantry. He's helping her. She was a single mom. She was a sole provider for months on end, and here he comes into town. She's going to take any reprieve she can get.

And what happened was she lost her.

Jacket and she accused me of stealing her jacket.

And you know, in the j just person households.

We don't steal like that is like something is the coat of honor, you don't steal. And so I told my dad that her parents think I'm a thief and that I.

Stole her coat.

So he walked over there and confronted her parents.

And I was so nervous because he was so aggressive. I was just terrified of what.

He's going to do to that to her parents. And he explained how I didn't steal that jacket, and he pretty much I don't know remember exactly what he said, but he really terrified her parents so much so that she never came back to my house.

But there's something about the letter that holds you that makes you keep reading. Maybe it's the urgency of the prose itself. Maybe, although you might not want to admit it, it's the lurid details spelling off the pages like cold sewage. Maybe the writer, whoever he is, is making it all up. But if so, you have to wonder what kind of person would even be able to write something like this. This turned me on. I got high panic set in

Now happy faces.

On one side of the coin, he's a loving family man, and he's a good friend, and he's.

He's a good provider.

He's everything that you know as a child you want for a dad. And then on the other side of the coin, he is everything that scares you, everything that could hurt you. He goes from protected or predator and wrapping my mind around it is impossible. I started to notice the shift in the household, probably about when I was in kindergarten first grade.

Things started to change in the household.

My mom seemed more withdrawn, and I imagine her being isolated in a house with three young children must have been difficult for her and my father being gone.

But when he would come home.

There seemed to be a distance between my mom and my dad physically as well, that I didn't witness them hugging or being affectionate with one another. I actually don't even recall kissing. I can't even remember if they even kissed each other when they greeted each other. Now, looking back, I see the dynamic between my parents and recalling how

I was never thad enough or I was too fat. You know, if I ate dinner, old God forbid, if I ate dinner.

As a kid, when I was alone with my father, he would bring up that he constantly felt sexually rejected, and he would say that My mom would tell him to go.

Put it in a key hole.

So what was your father thinking talking about his sex life with his child?

My father sex life was always a part of the conversation. I heard it with his friends. I heard it in the flirtation and the sexual harassment of waitresses. I heard it having to hear him tell me these details about their sex life. I never asked my father, it was just part of the conversation constantly. I knew that my father was a very sexual man from a young age.

My good.

Lie to me.

When Bennett's body was found actually about a mile west of Lateral Falls and a mile and a half east of the Vista house, there was a rope around her neck.

Ely addition, as the police reports indicate, the buttonfly of bennett jeans had been cut away.

In the fin.

In the letter continues, she was my first and I thought I would not do it again, but I was wrong.

It was clear that Keith had no filter for what was appropriate to say or do in front of his kids, and many of his other impulses were even darker, and he acted upon them.

I remember there was a weekend that my dad was back home and he from one of his long hauls and there was a barrel, a rusty barrel that he was burning shrubbery and old debris.

From the yard. And he was cleaning the yard.

And we had this barn, and behind the barn, I saw my brother and he had a black cat. And I remember how dark the cat's fur was, because it was so shiny. It looked silvery like, almost like glass from the sun hitting the cat's back, hitting the fur. And so I saw my brother just petting this black cat, and how slick and pretty the cat looked, and I wanted to touch this cat too. I wanted to pet and so I went up to my brother and I sat next to him behind the barn, and I started

He walks up to us, and he says, what do you have there.

I remember my dad's sitting down to the other side of Jason and taking the cat in his lap, and he started petting the cat, and both my brother and I were tense, like if we could feel like something's something's wrong because we knew my dad hated cats, absolutely hated them. So for my dad to be sitting next to my brother petting this cat was odd that he would be lovingly petting a cat.

And quickly he was. I remember his big hand.

Just like engulfing the whole cat, and then all of a sudden, with one hand, he pinned the head down and grabbed it with the other hand, and he's just started squeezing the cat's neck. And then the cat started to like screech and to scream and started clawing for its life on my dad's forearms and.

Just was clawing.

And I was thinking, and my brother and I were screaming, and we're like stop a dad, Stop a dad, Like why are you doing this, dad, Why are you doing this? And just screaming at him to try to like stop it, like it just it made me so nauseous, Like it just made me.

How old would you and Jason have been?

We were young, My brother and I were young, we were six seven years old. I don't recall telling my mom, I don't recall telling anybody. And the reason and why is it's just like when it came to my father, there was just this thing that people said in the family, they would say, Oh, that's just Keith, That's just how Keith is, and it seemed to be acceptable.

Keith Jessperson takes steps toward a court appearance he's tried to avoid for years, as well as an order and your plea of no contest to the aggravated murder cat After prosecutors read off the charges and with the victim's family looking on, Jesperson gave grizzly details of how in nineteen ninety he killed twenty three year old Tanya Bennett in his apartment.

And forced my fist into her throat and later grabbed the rope and tied around her neck securely, and she was dead.

You know. I slept in the hallway that one night. The second night, I slept on the couch.

And kept the TV on so i'd have light.

And as I laid on the couch, I looked up the ceiling and I saw markings on the ceiling of some kind of splatter. And then as I was laying there, the cabinet doors in the kitchen were opening and closing, and I remember touching my eyes and rubbing my eyes, thinking I must be seeing things.

But I would hear it too. They would open and they would close.

Says, He left the body in the Columbia Gorge, then cleaned up his house.

Washed the carpet, I washed the blood off the walls what I could, and eventually painted the walls of the house I was in and try to forget about it.

I would later discover that in that very room where I was laying down was where he he murdered Tanya Bennett in the most gruesome and brutal way possible, And that now I look back and think, was that blood that I saw?

And I believe it was.

My girl?

My girl? Don't lie to me? Tell me where didiou sleep? Last night?

Happy Face is a production of How Stuff Works. Executive producers are Melissa Moore, Lauren Bright, Butcheco Mangesha Ticketer, and Will Pearson. Supervising producer is Noel Brown. Music by Claire Campbell, Paige Campbell and Hope for a Golden Summer. Story editor is Matt Riddle. Audio editing by Chandler Mays and Noel Brown. Assistant editor is Taylor Chacoygne. Special thanks to Phil Stanford, the publishers of the Oregonian newspaper in k t U News In Portland, Oregon

Go away where the cold Wan blows